'Give these brown babies a shot': UNC defends its use of race in admissions

A legal battle that's engulfed the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill offers a rare window into how admissions staffers at an elite public university discuss applicants — and the extent to which race plays into those exchanges.

“Can we get excited for this brown ... boy who’s being raised by his grandfather, wants to become a surgeon, #2 in his class?" an admissions officer wrote in one online chat unearthed by opponents of affirmative action. "Yes! Admit w/ merit!”

Story Continued Below

This chat and others were entered as evidence last month in a federal court case in the Middle District of North Carolina, filed by a group that wants to undermine affirmative action.

In another chat, an employee wrote: “Give these brown babies a shot at these merit $$."

“If its brown and above a 1300 put them in for merit/Excel,” read a third chat, referring to financial aid at the university.

Morning Education

By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time.

The frank back-and-forth among unidentified UNC staffers, dating from 2014, is part of a slew of chats and emails figuring in a lawsuit over how UNC considers race in admissions. Roughly a third of U.S. universities consider the race of applicants when they reach decisions about which students receive highly coveted acceptance letters and which are denied.

The five-year-old legal fight comes at the same time that debates over race, privilege and discrimination are roiling higher education and the nation, most recently over whether Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam used blackface while in medical school. The North Carolina case is one of two over affirmative action that potentially could reach the Supreme Court.

Colleges have argued it’s imperative they enroll a diverse student body, in part because of incidents like in Virginia. The Supreme Court, which has repeatedly approved the use of race in admitting college students, has agreed— noting that creating a diverse student body “promotes cross-racial understanding, helps to break down racial stereotypes, and enables students to better understand persons of different races.”

But the group suing UNC, Students For Fair Admissions, contends the chats and emails show that UNC has gone too far.

Students for Fair Admissions alleges that UNC admissions officials closely monitor the racial makeup of an incoming class, which SFFA has said is tantamount to racial balancing. And it claims that non-minority UNC students have "far stronger academic qualifications" than minority students, that UNC "gives substantial preferences" to minorities and that UNC "uses race in a mechanical, formulaic way."

"Readers are keenly focused on the applicant’s race,” attorneys for SFFA wrote in court filings. The suit has not yet gone to trial, and the latest step was a filing of motions for summary judgment last month.

UNC Vice Provost for Enrollment and Undergraduate Admissions Steve Farmer said in a statement that the online exchanges don’t “reflect Carolina’s values or our admissions process.”

“We only consider race or ethnicity as one of a multitude of factors, if a student chooses to share that information on the standard Common Application, as is consistent with the law,” Farmer said. “Our admissions staff receive rigorous training on how to read and discuss applications and follow written guidelines.”

The university noted that the conversations cited in the suit were “cherry picked from the 380,000 pages of documents and information about 200,000 applicants that we provided.”

UNC's attorneys say the school has "closely adhered" to Supreme Court precedent, including considering race in admissions in a narrowly tailored manner. They say the lawsuit is just one of the group’s "attempts to rewrite the law and dictate University policy." SFFA wants the court to "impose a new constitutional standard" on UNC, the lawyers say.

SFFA is also suing Harvard University, in a closely watched challenge to the Ivy League school’s admissions policies, which SFFA contends discriminate against Asian-American applicants.

SFFA is led by Edward Blum, a longtime opponent of affirmative action who was also the architect of a legal challenge against the University of Texas at Austin. The case ended up before the Supreme Court, which sided with UT Austin.

With President Donald Trump constructing a more conservative high court, the Harvard case is widely believed to be the next best shot at ending affirmative action. But the UNC case is waiting in the wings should that effort fail.

In the chats and emails included as evidence, which mostly appear to be from the early stages of an admissions process, UNC officials often referred to applicants’ race, and experts say that's not unusual.

“A lot of what happens during the reading and review process is, there is kind of a give-and-take — horse trading, as you will — to talk about applicants as they relate to other applicants, as they relate to admissions criteria,” said David Hawkins, executive director for educational content and policy at the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

He said language in the 2014 chats isn’t “ideal,” but they seem like early conversations about applicants, and don’t seem to indicate any final decisions — so it’s impossible to tell how much race actually ended up mattering. These readers are only making recommendations that will later be considered by other admissions officials and a full committee.

“There’s likely to be a much deeper conversation about how the student fits in at all and whether they can succeed,” Hawkins said.

Still, for schools that consider race in admissions “it wouldn’t be uncommon to talk about an applicant as a brown student or a Native American student or a white student.”

UNC staffers in the chats, along with race, also touted applicants’ academic credentials — perfect SAT scores and high marks on Advanced Placement tests — and stress how much hardship the applicants have overcome.

One applicant, they wrote, “works 35 hours/week,” was a first generation college student and an underrepresented minority. “Single mom, unemployed,” they wrote.

In some cases, officials questioned whether other readers were fairly considering an applicant’s full background — whether they attended a school that didn’t offer as many advanced courses or extracurricular opportunities as other applicants, for instance, but did as much as they could.

In December 2015, one admissions official wrote to another that some other readers “are missing the school context.”

“They’re penalizing students for modest programs but missing the fact that the school only offers a few APs, so in context, the student is actually exhausting or nearly exhausting the rigor that’s available to them,” they wrote.

UNC attorneys stressed in court filings that the university doesn’t have racial quotas and readers are never given targets or numerical goals for shaping the incoming class. Caroline Hoxby, an economist UNC hired to study admissions data for the case, concluded race explains very little of UNC’s admissions decisions — between 0.8 and 5.6 percent, depending on the model.

But the chat messages and emails show how race comes up.

In a March 2014 email, an admissions official wrote another colleague asking whether an applicant who lived in North Carolina with his mother, but whose father lived in Texas, might be considered an in-state applicant, even though he marked on his application that he was not a North Carolina resident.

“I’m going through this trouble because this is a bi-racial (black/white) male,” the official wrote. “I would definitely admit for NC.”

In May, an academic adviser in the university’s College of Arts & Science wrote two admissions officials about an applicant.

“We know this is late admission but we would like to see [REDACTED] have a shot,” she wrote. “She is an Hispanic minority and good background to have this opportunity.”

In November 2013, one official wrote to another with questions about “an AA female, with solid everything that adds up to an admit for me.”

In the 2014 chat exchange where admissions officials wrote about giving “brown babies a shot at these merit $$,” one official wrote: “I don’t think I can admit or defer this brown girl … Testing, ECs and performance are too low for me to even make an argument.”

“Yep. gotta let her go,” another replied.

In another exchange, one official wrote about an applicant with “perfect 2400 SAT All 5 on AP one B in 11th.”

“Brown?!” another responded.

“Heck no,” the first wrote back. “Asian.”

“Of course,” the other wrote. “Still impressive."

Overall, the conversations show a “racial awareness” in UNC's admissions office, said Liliana Garces, an associate professor of education at the University of Texas at Austin and an affiliate faculty member at UT’s School of Law.

“That to me is necessary in order to make an informed decision that’s really considering all the various factors that make up an applicant,” said Garces, who was the counsel of record in an amicus brief filed on behalf of hundreds of social scientists supporting UT Austin when the Supreme Court considered its use of race in admissions in 2016.

“Because of how it matters in our society in that very structural way, it can shape our experiences, our life chances, the ways in which, the opportunities you have before you,” Garces said. “We don’t want it to matter, but it does for a lot of students.”